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For our first pass, we would like to set up 3 machines in an as shown in the diagram above. We expect that we'll have to do some experimenting to get these "right". Once we are happy with these 3 VMs (Let us call the 3 machines together the "application assembly") we plan to clone the VMs to create a QA, and a PROD environment. Our general plan for managing changes is to make changes to DEV. After DEV is stable, we will "promote" the assembly to QA. After QA passes all testing, we will "promote" QA to PROD. Is this the right way to do things in VMWare land? Is there a way to clone the entire assembly? Will we have to tweak the firewall settings each time we clone to a new environment?Our primitive datacenter BCP plan is as follows. Whenever we change a VM configuration, we take copy the VM ". We will have 3 environments: DEV, QA, PROD. We want to be able to promote the application from DEV to QA, and from QA to PROD.
Application failover must be achieved within 2-4 hours and proceeds several ways depending on the nature of the failure. Here we discuss fail-over only in the context of lost connectivity to the data center with an uncertain time to restore operations at that datacenter. When there is a configuration change, either at the VM level or at the application level, we clone the entire application and store it offsite (at the city?). Should the datacenter fail badly (fire, etc), we provide carinet with the VMsapplication, and carinet brings up the VMs application at another location. Does this sound sane? Note that we handle DB backups separately.
We plan to move these VMs the application to our data center by midyear 2011. We want to insure that these VMs are the application is portable. The chips in our data center will be Intel Xeon. We expect to do a simple VM copy (or similar) and do not need v-motion. Does this all seem right?
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- Provision hardware
- Provide 3 VMs
- VMWare version 4.1
- install Centos 5 64-bit on each VMinstall Apache web server on the web server VM only
- install package manager (yum or Apt-get)
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